


I Don't Trust Me

by themegalosaurus



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Depression, Eating Disorders, Gen, Guilty Sam, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-10
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-04 03:36:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1764265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themegalosaurus/pseuds/themegalosaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A slight AU for Season 5 (starts at the end of 5.02) in which Sam's guilt about the events of Season 4 has him obsessively focused on self-discipline and self-control. Sticks close to canon but with even more angst!!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"I know you don't trust me", Sam finds himself saying, "but I just realized something. I don't trust me either."

It's such a shameful confession that even the act of speaking the words gives him a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Somehow, admitting his weakness so openly helps him recognize how painfully obvious it is. That whole year he'd spent kidding himself that he was stronger, better, more powerful than anybody around him; that he could take care of things without Dean's co-operation; that it was Dean who had been weakened by those four months (forty years): well, it's now becoming pretty clear what an idiotic figure he must have cut. Jacked up on demon blood and Ruby's ego-boosting lies, he'd stumbled and fumbled and gorged his way along precisely the path she had set out. It's embarrassing how deluded he has been, discounting Dean's objections as though his suspicion was a sign of stupidity. Dean isn't weak. He's never been weak. Sam, on the other hand, has always been a failure.

Dean sighs and looks out over the dark green silence of the forest to the side of the picnic spot where they've parked.

"I'm in no shape to be hunting," Sam says. "Maybe it's best if we just go our separate ways."

This isn't the first time they've been in this situation. Seven years earlier, Sam and his father had capped off a drawn-out battle about Sam's future with an argument Sam thought would be the last they'd ever have; and he'd turned on his heel, grabbed his duffel, and headed for California and a different kind of life. He hadn't stopped, on that occasion, to consult with Dean. He knew that leaving was a kind of betrayal: that although Dad had always placed a lot more trust in Dean, it still wasn't fair to abandon his brother to deal with Dad's grim silences and toughen-up attitude alone. Dad wasn't the enemy - not for Dean at least - but he wasn't quite an ally, either, critical rather than kind. Dean and Sam had spent a lot of their adolescence patching up one another's injuries in motel bathrooms after Dad had gone to bed, grimacing sympathetically across diner tables the next morning as they gritted their teeth and tried to hide the pain. If a wound didn't need stitches or involve a broken bone, Dad tended to dismiss it after a cursory glance. Complaining about it after that would earn you insults, or push-ups, or both. Leaving Dean alone with their father meant trading in this history of complicity and trust for a future he didn't yet know: gambling on normality and a life that he could control.

Of course, Sam had failed at that as well. When he'd started dreaming about Jess's fiery death, he'd simply shut his eyes and wished for it to go away; hoping idiotically that the monsters couldn't touch him if he kept on pretending really hard that they weren't real. It was the same kind of stubborn stupidity that had kept him ignoring every screaming sign to stop with which the universe had issued him since Dean had gone to Hell. "They don't understand," Ruby had told him - and he'd believed her. He could only imagine his father's scorn. There was that college-boy cleverness his Dad had always despised; the smug self-assurance that had him thinking he knew best, better than all the better people who'd told him he was going too far. Dean's horrified reaction to the demon blood had been only the last in a long line of shocked recoils. The angels. Chuck. Even Sam himself had known that it was wrong - or why had he resisted Ruby for so long? But no, despite it all he'd finally screwed his eyelids tight, carrying the whole of humanity along with him square into the path of destruction.

So much for Dean holding him back. He's been holding Dean back since 2005. And now, the damage done, his best hope at limiting what might follow is to cut himself loose, as cleanly as he can.

"I think you're right," Dean says. And just like that, it's over; four years of rediscovered codependency amputated like a limb. Sam feels as dizzy as if it were an arm or leg, rather than a brother, being lost. But he manages - this last time - to keep it together, smiling tightly and gratefully and hurrying away from Dean's conciliatory offer of the car. That itself makes him weak with self-disgust. Dean's baby and he's stoically offering it up to the no-good brother who's done nothing but let him down.

It's a relief when the first driver he approaches offers him the passenger seat and doesn't ask for an explanation. As the truck pulls away, Sam gazes blindly out of the window, shamed afresh by the contrast: Dean's capacity for self-denial against his own humiliating lack of control. He can't stop thinking about it for the rest of the six-hour journey. He's still thinking about it when, two days and three rides later, he unfolds himself onto the asphalt of some two-bit town in Oklahoma, checks into a motel and tries to imagine what might come next.

Last time Sam had to cope without Dean he'd sunk into self-destruction with barely a backward glance. Barely a week after that horrible night in New Harmony and he'd already lost all semblance of self-discipline, slipping fast and dirty into drinking and fucking around; staggering from bar to crossroads to swindling psychic's den, picking fights wherever he could so he'd hurt on the outside, too. No wonder Ruby had caught the opportunity. He was looking for something to binge on and she'd offered herself up on a plate.

So this time, sitting lonely on the bed of his motel room, Sam juts his chin and straightens his back, resolved. He will not let himself behave that way again.

No. This time things will be different. More like Stanford, where he'd spent the whole first year working every hour of every day; fuelled by the furious, desperate desire to quiet the guilty voice in his head. More like, even, the lost six months after Broward County. OK, so that hadn’t exactly been pretty: he can still feel the horrible prickle of that pause before the Bobby he had stabbed to death dissolved to reveal the Trickster. But he’d taken that risk because he had a mission: to get Dean back, or destroy the monster that had taken him. This time, the only monster Sam needs to punish is himself.

Sam goes to bed hungry. He hasn’t eaten since he left Dean. That’s what it’s all about, right? Self-control. So the twist of his stomach feels like a sign that he’s starting to get things right.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A slight AU for Season 5 (starts at the end of 5.02) in which Sam's guilt about the events of Season 4 has him obsessively focused on self-discipline and self-control. Sticks close to canon but with even more angst!!

Sam’s feet punch against the asphalt of the highway. His thighs and his chest are burning, and the sweat on his forehead is dripping painfully into his eyes. Suck it up, Sammy, he thinks. Suck it up, you bloodsucking freak. He keeps on going. 

Sam has to run further every day than the morning before. Forty-five minutes out, as fast as he thinks he can do it, and forty minutes back, so he doesn’t have the chance to slack off. If he doesn’t make it all the way back to the motel in time, he doesn’t get to eat anything until after he finishes work. Those are the rules; and though he knows they’re self-imposed, they’re already set reassuringly rigid in his mind.

He just makes it, today, sprinting flat-out for the last half-mile with the motel wavering in sight at the end of the street; slamming his hand onto the flaking wood of the door as his wristwatch tells him there are 25 seconds to go. His breath rasps gritty in his throat. His hand is shaking and the key skitters across the lock twice, three times before he can finally force it in. Come on Sam, he thinks. Don’t be such a bitch.

At work that afternoon the bar is quiet. Sam wipes down tables, stacks glasses, brings in the drinks delivery. He doesn’t speak to anybody until 4pm, when Lindsey arrives for her shift and greets him with a ‘Hey’. That’s okay. Sam’s conserving words as well.

He likes Lindsey, but he can feel her look at him as he works. It makes his skin feel taut and his heart beat faster. Stop it, he thinks. I’m not really here at all.

Sam goes to bed with a sensation of relief. Another day over and he is pretty sure that he hasn’t done anything dangerous or stupid enough to hurt anybody else. But when he wakes up in the middle of the night to find Jessica gazing into his eyes, he’s absolutely certain that this isn’t any kind of reward. 

It’s worse because he hasn’t even thought about her for so long: he’s been so busy trying not to think about Dean. Hardening himself to the latest wound seems to have left the old unattended sore more raw and open, so that the sight of her propels him instantly back to the grief and desperation of that first year back on the road. “I miss you,” he says; and thinks, I’m so lonely it hurts. It’s worse because Jessica is so palpably real. The vividness of her terrifies him, draws him with a complicated longing even as she reminds him, in her beautiful forgotten voice, of all the reasons he can never have this again. Not just her, or the life they were supposed to have together; no, the whole difficult, crucial business of love, of caring hard about somebody and having them care about you. Sam isn’t going to be close to anybody, not any more. 

He’s so shaken up that he can’t sleep for the rest of the night. When he runs the next morning, his legs feel heavy and sore. He catches himself stumbling more than once; and by the time his watch beeps to tell him he should be back, he’s still a good 400 yards away from the motel. 

This failure sets him up for a terrible day. Lindsey keeps asking him questions that he doesn’t know how to answer, pressing him for a history he’s only half-bothered to invent. Then a couple sits down at a table covered in debris when Sam is clearing glasses on the other side of the room. He has to break sequence to clean it up for them and he never quite manages to get back in sync. By the end of the night he can’t even be sure that all of the tables have been wiped the same number of times. He’s pulled out of his jitters by the television over the bar, reporting weather conditions that sound decidedly demonic a few towns over. Mandatory evacuation, says the woman on TV. Sam’s head swims with images of families, abandoning belongings and homes and safety and running away. Of elderly people, or children, or pets, stranded and dying as the storm thunders down. 

It’s enough to push him into speaking before he’s spoken to, calling up Bobby to tip him off about what’s going down. That conversation goes nowhere quickly, as Bobby seems to be of the same belief as fantasy-Jess: that Sam’s plan, to protect the rest of the world from his own destructive stupidity, is actually as selfish and ill-thought-through as his other ideas. But Sam knows, he just knows, that it would be madness to drop himself into a town full of demons right now. Something desperate will happen and he’ll think there’s no alternative and a demon will be lying dead and gory on the floor – and there’s just no way he can go through detox alone in an Oklahoma motel room. “Sorry, Bobby,” he says, heavy with the familiar weight of disappointing the people he loves. 

Later, lying open-eyed in his lonely bed, Sam thinks, at least it hurt. It hurt me to say no so I guess it’s the right thing to do. 

It’s not clear whether fantasy-Jess would agree. She doesn’t materialise again, although Sam finds himself aching for her to return. He sleeps shallowly, blinking awake several times to the sight of an empty pillow and the clench of a knot at his heart. I’m sorry, he thinks. I miss you, he thinks. Come back.

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably going to be pretty long by the time it's finished; I'm hoping to update at least weekly. Feedback very welcome as I haven't written fanfic for years!


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